Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Law
Bounded Evaluation: Cognition, Incoherence, And Regulatory Policy, Cary Coglianese
Bounded Evaluation: Cognition, Incoherence, And Regulatory Policy, Cary Coglianese
All Faculty Scholarship
Cass Sunstein, Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade, and Ilana Ritov have recently advanced a cognitive explanation for incoherence in legal decisionmaking, showing how decision makers tend to make micro-level judgments that make little sense when viewed from a broader perspective. Among other things, they claimed to have discovered striking incoherence in regulatory policy evidenced by varied penalty levels across different statutes, with less serious violations sometimes backed up with higher penalties than more serious violations. This paper comments on Sunstein et al.'s treatment of incoherence in regulatory policy, arguing that the same cognitive limitations that Sunstein et al. argue lead to …